A New Life

They say again it is a new world
bringing with it new orders, new procedures, new personalities,
and, inevitably, new truth.

But each day everything is renewed, always,
whether it is what we think we wanted or not;
the alleged new world is justly only a new explanation
for something that will be replaced tomorrow,
and in turn replaced, again and again,
as long as we breathe in this curious world
taking our part of it,
our little part of it.

But each day is a different world,
no matter how precedent and history, like parents,
try to insist on modeling it, and us,
in genetic repetitions on the earth and sea,
wherever we go.

A truth is something which changes in time,
a falsehood is fixed in its moment, deceiving us
because it does not change.

As I write this, the world opens up yet another occasions,
as it will do beyond anything we can imagine,
so much greater than our tiny interval in it,
and we must decide how we will live in it as one more life
always contained in our lamented limitations.

Our disappointments are like splinters in our fingers,
painful until we remove them, and heal them,
find a way past them, riding over and through the world
as if it were a railroad with passengers
which requires us to go and stop and go again,
boarding and deboarding, visiting and adventuring,
punctuated by sleep and the dark dreams we use
to prepare ourselves, again and again, for a constant new life.